NEWLY-DISCOVERED VERSION OF THE STORY OF THE FLOOD. 151 



tions and giving them the curious local terms which show alike 

 their antiquity and source. 



Mr. Martin Eouse, B.A., said : I have been away from this 

 country for three years, and am very glad to be once more at a 

 meeting of the Victoria Institute. I am particularly glad to be 

 present on this occasion, and to hear Dr. Pinches' views concerning 

 this fragment of a fourth and most ancient version of the Assyrian 

 story of the Deluge, and his comments upon it and reviews of the 

 other versions. 



In comparing the much later but more complete version discovered 

 by Mr. George Smith with the Bible narrative, I would first point 

 out that whereas, according to Sayce's rendering, Ut-napishtim 

 brought into his ship his family and his concubines, at the end the 

 god Ea took his hand and that of his wife, and uttered a decree that 

 thenceforth the}^ two should be like gods and dwell in a heavenly 

 abode. Thus the truth breaks through the corruptions with which 

 Eastern voluptuousness has overlaid it, and Noah appears as in the 

 Bible "perfect in his generations." 



Again, when the Flood had made havoc of all mankind outside 

 the ship, the goddess Ishtar is said to have raised this bitter 

 lamentation, "I have begotten man, but where is he? Like the 

 sons of the fishes he fills the sea." It has been suggested, and this 

 episode bears out the inference, that the Egyptian Isis, first queen 

 of Egypt and the world, is identical with the Babylonian Ishtar, and 

 that both names are modified forms of Isha, the earlier name of our 

 first mother, of whom Adam said. She shall be called Isha (woman) 

 because she was taken out of Ish (man). 



The Assyrian story notably displays its inferiority to the Biblical 

 in the undignified flight of the gods to remote corners of the 

 universe where they "kennelled like dogs," and in the dissension 

 of the gods during the catastrophe Ishtar disapproving of a Deluge 

 because it wrought a too wholesale destruction, whereas Bel, or 

 Enlil, could not endure that even one family should escape. On 

 the other hand, certain unique details show the two stories to be of 

 one event — the smearing of the ship inside as well as outside with 

 pitch, the sending out of the raven and the dove to test the redrying 

 of the ground, the offering of a "sweet savour" to Heaven by the 

 good man just after his exit from the ship, and the appearing of some 

 beautiful phenomenon in the sky in token of Heaven's acceptance. 



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